Phillipe Roberts
Jeremy Ray and Andrew Thawley, the duo at the helm of D.C. sensation Dove Lady, cruise through their twisted prog pop tunes with a miraculous ease for such a limitless, genre-snapping hysteria. Just flip through One, their latest release and the first to break away from their 26 EP game plan (one for each letter of the alphabet), and you’ll find screeching math rock riffery, beachy anthems, and charming instrumentals, all impeccably timed and compacted into one seriously heady trip of an EP.
And yet, gliding in at the tail end of the record, the free and fierce grooves of “Ferbalicious” still manage to take a running jump at you. With soothing waves of ambience crashing around a muscular, tightly wound breakbeat, the duo rockets into a krautrock dance number with a satisfying crunch that echoes vintage indie radicals Stereolab.
In the accompanying video, their left-field style is given quite a literal visual treatment from the get-go as Ray’s face swims superimposed in front of Thawley. We see Ray slumbering upstairs, his head wrapped in a crown of pulsating Christmas lights, until Thawley joins him, coiling himself in the wires and falling into a Matrix-like dream state where the two meditate in a field. Cut back-to-back with footage of the two, glittering with silver face paint and pounding out the grooves in a small room, it’s an appropriately mind boggling but lovely metaphor for the symbiotic relationship at the soul of their music.